Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field

**Dylan Field** (0:00)
We're no longer in this era of good enough is fine. Good enough is not enough. It's mediocre. If you want to win in the game of software, you need to differentiate your design. Craft matters. What are a couple lessons you've learned for founders that are thinking about startup ideas? We started the company August 2012, started working hardcore at Figma June 2013, and then summer 2017, we made our first money. Don't do that. Get to market faster. I wish we had. Is there a counterintuitive decision you made along the journey of Figma? Figma, FigJam. About a month before the launch of FigJam at Config, it was like, okay, we built a thing. It's just lacking something. The soul isn't there. Let's go differentiate by making FigJam fun. The team was like, what? We're going to make fun our differentiator? In retrospect, it was absolutely the right move. Let's talk about Figma Make. The use cases that seem to be emerging in this world of AI and prototyping are prototypes for product teams. PMs are no longer saying to the designer, hey, can you draw this thing out for me? That frees up designer time to go explore more deeply the stuff they need to go into, and it allows anyone to add to that first conversation of where should we go? Which function maybe is most in trouble? It all depends on the way that things play out from here. What you have to believe is your organization is better as models get better. Have we seen productivity increases? Yeah, but that is not something that has made our new headcount we want for engineering go down. We're hiring. Today, my guest is Dylan Field. Dylan is the CEO and co-founder of Figma, one of the most beloved and used products in the world. I don't know a single product team that doesn't use and love Figma, which is extremely rare. In our chat, we talk about how Dylan kept the company focused and motivated after the Adobe deal fell through, how he's most evolved as a leader over the past 13 years, his vision for Figma Make, and how it's different from the other products out there, how he expects product building to look in five years, what good product taste looks like, his strategy for launching new product lines, and how market size is the wrong way to think about it, and so much more. This conversation was so delightful. Dylan is such a nice, interesting, curious human, and I always have such a great time talking to him. I guarantee you'll both enjoy this conversation and find a lot of nuggets to take back to your team. A big thank you to Mihika Kapoor, Robert Bai, Yuki Yamashita, Akshay Kathari, and Zach Lloyd for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get 15 incredible products for free including Lovable, Replet, Bolt, N8M, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Busper Flow, Gamma Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD, and Mobbin. Head on over to lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Dylan Field. 1.3%. It's a small number, but in the right context, it's a powerful one. Stripe processed just over $1.4 trillion last year. That figure works out to be about 1.3% of global GDP. It's a lot, but it's also just 1.3%. Stripe handles the massive scale and complexity of many of the world's fastest growing enterprises, including 78% of the Forbes AI 50 and more than half of the Fortune 100 There's a reason I've had more leaders from Stripe on this podcast than any other company. They know how to build great products that scale and that people love. Stripe is also a lot more than just payments. They've also got a category-leading billing solution and a highly optimized checkout experience built specifically to increase your checkout conversion. Enterprises like Atlassian, Figma, and Urban use Stripe to create fully branded and customized checkout pages with access to more than 125 global payment methods. Join the ranks of industry leaders like Salesforce, OpenAI, and Pepsi, that are using Stripe to grow faster and grow GDP. Learn how Stripe can help your business grow at stripe.com.
Dylan, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast. Hey Lenny, thank you for having me back. It's great to see you. It's also great to see you too, Dylan. The last time we chatted, this was right after the Adobe deal didn't work out. Now you're a public company, a public CEO. Congrats on that. Specifically post Adobe deal falling through. The journey you guys have taken to IPO is quite unusual. You almost sold the company to Adobe for a lot of money, and then the deal fell through. My understanding is it fell through because the UK government regulatory boards just didn't want it to happen. Is that why it fell through? What's the story there, by the way? Yeah, various regulators did not like the deal and had arguments against it. No need to go into those.